Jennie Osborne is a member of the Two Rivers group of poets, of Liskeard Poets and of Moor Poets. She lives in Totnes and reads at venues around the region. Last year Jennie won third prize in the Renato Giorgi International Poetry Competition, and co-edited Moor Poets II, an anthology of poetry inspired by Dartmoor. Her work has been published in a wide range of magazines and anthologies. Besides writing poetry she enjoys singing, dancing and playing the clarinet.

Quelle: poetry p f


Walking the Year

Today, bundled like Christmas parcels,
we walk the white moor,
flirt with the treachery of frost underfoot,
the frown of snow above the next tor,
with the chance we can’t quite dismiss
of whitedown, drowning senses,
the world blinked out.

It doesn’t happen. Instead,
watching our boot toes pick their way
through gorse and bracken,
we stumble, almost,
into an ice-picture, feathered in frost,
brittle over a pocket of air.

We stare a while, the damp of snow
creeping through our soles, until
one of us bends down, breaks it.
Splinters cascade from her hands,
the year’s cargo of deaths and meetings,
its grazed shins and its music-making
seeping into soil.
She wanted to, she said, she really wanted to.

Jennie Osborne
originally published in Moor Poets Vol.II, 2005